Practising difference across geography: A transdisciplinary and Deleuzian approach to intradisciplinary thinking

Abstract

The quality of intradisciplinary thinking during research design is crucial not only for alleviating multifaceted problems – such as global environmental change – but potentially to avoid worsening them. This article builds on the emphasis placed on research framing by human, physical and critical physical geographers by drawing from ideas on iterative framing in transdisciplinarity studies – as related to collaboration between geography’s internal subdisciplines – as well as from Gilles Deleuze, especially in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994 (1968)). Here, research reframing is based on a critical engagement with the contrasts in subdisciplinary foci and research methodologies, which I argue is achieved through a consideration of contrasting axiologies and facilitated by subdisciplinary encounter. I explore this approach to intradisciplinary thinking using examples from the literature in geography and beyond. Given that collaboration across research methodologies is challenging, I demonstrate one example practical approach to such intradisciplinary thinking: mapping. Different map-making and map-using activities can reflect contrasting forms of data and understandings from the field, and can therefore act as a shared space of encounter for geographers of all kinds.

Introduction

The quality of intradisciplinary thinking during research design is crucial not only for alleviating multifaceted problems – such as global environmental change – but potentially to avoid worsening them. Across human geography, physical geography and beyond, there is increased recognition that some apparently multidimensional research practices miss crucial aspects, close off possible solutions and reinforce the status quo, as a consequence of their approach to the framing of research projects (Grove and Rickards, 2022; Lave et al., 2018; Nightingale et al., 2020). This article builds on these arguments by drawing on ideas concerning the iterative framing of research from transdisciplinarity studies – as related to collaboration between geography’s internal subdisciplines – as well as from Gilles Deleuze, especially in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994 (1968)). The importance of research framing has been previously highlighted both by physical and human geographers (e.g. Nightingale, 2016; Oughton and Bracken, 2009; Petts et al., 2008) and also notably recently by critical physical geographers (e.g. Lave et al., 2018).

Transdisciplinarity is often conflated with interdisciplinarity, but takes a distinctive approach to the co-production of knowledge by researchers from contrasting (sub)disciplines or research approaches. Transdisciplinarity, as deployed in this article, is based on a critical engagement with contrasts in (sub)disciplinary foci and research approach, through which it is argued that more holistic framings of research problems and research questions are generated; that is, framings that reflect more of the complexity of phenomena. As such, this article also presents an underexplored rationale for how geography’s internal diversity is valuable – a recurrently debated theme (recently in, for example, Castree et al., 2022; Grove and Rickards, 2022; Liu et al., 2022; Rhoads, 2022; Sheppard, 2022; Thomas, 2022) – beyond the thematic benefit of the discipline’s expertise in both social and biophysical processes for tackling grand socio-environmental challenges. Here, it is not just the contrast in focus between the social and the biophysical that may facilitate more holistic thinking, but differences in focus and methodological processes between any of human and physical geography’s subdisciplines.

After first introducing transdisciplinarity, I will discuss in detail the value of research reframing and then demonstrate how this might be achieved through both a consideration of axiology and subdisciplinary encounter, illustrating with examples from the literature in transdisciplinarity studies, geography and beyond. The work of Deleuze is invaluable for understanding ideas in transdisciplinarity studies. I draw on Deleuze here in the sense of his central concern with thinking through problems (Deleuze, 1994 (1968): xv-xvii), rather than as a source of conceptual frameworks to describe relationality and process in the world per se, as he is commonly deployed in geography. Deleuze’s ideas on differenc/tiation and the actual/virtual are particularly helpful in explicating arguments in transdisciplinarity. As will be demonstrated in this article, these Deleuzian concepts are central to his theory of the process by which disciplinary difference creates new understandings. Deleuze (1994 (1968)) makes clear that it is not multiple perspectives as such that are important here, but making generative use of the situatedness of research.

In the final part of the article, I demonstrate one practical approach to enacting transdisciplinary thinking within geography: mapping (a term that refers to both map-making and map-use). Here, mapping is understood in a processual way, whereby data or understandings may be generated within the map-making and map-using processes themselves and are not necessarily plotted or translated into features on a final map. Thus, mapping can provide a common, visual focus for teams of geographers with mixed research orientations, enabling the transdisciplinary thinking discussed here.

What is transdisciplinarity?

The terms multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity are frequently used interchangeably. Transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in particular are very inconsistently distinguished: they are sometimes used as equivalent terms, which occasionally leads to authors distinguishing a ‘strong transdisciplinarity’ (e.g. Ross and Mitchell, 2018), and sometimes what is described in one part of the literature as a variant of interdisciplinarity (e.g. ‘agonistic-antagonistic’ in Barry and Born, 2013: 12) is equivalent to what is described as transdisciplinarity in another. My aim is not to argue for fixed terminology, but rather to explore the characteristics of a distinctive approach to utilising (sub)disciplinary difference. This approach is termed transdisciplinarity by the authors I cite and so for the purposes of this article I adopt this term.

Multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity all refer to learning and research involving more than one (sub)discipline and usually relate to a collaborative team approach, but they each refer to different processes of synthesis. As described by Choi and Pak (2006: 351), ‘[t]he common words for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary are additive, interactive, and holistic, respectively’.

The history of the term multidisciplinary is not clear, but Choi and Pak (2006) find the first reference in a 1975 dictionary. A multidisciplinary approach is one in which researchers in different (sub)disciplines work separately on a project and juxtapose their findings at the end of the project – hence the descriptor ‘additive’ cited above. The term interdisciplinary was also in use in the 1970s and denotes an approach where researchers share a method or conceptual framework during the project (Choi and Pak, 2006) – hence ‘interactive’. Psychologist, philosopher and educator Jean Piaget is credited with introducing the term transdisciplinary in a 1970 seminar (Bernstein, 2015). Although the term interdisciplinary continued to be used in such fields as gender studies, environmental science and urban studies through the 1970s as described by Julie Thompson-Klein (1996), the term transdisciplinarity appears not to have been much utilised until the 1990s (Bernstein, 2015). That decade saw a diminishing confidence in separate disciplinary approaches by some (as explored by Messer-Davidow et al., 1993), alongside the surfacing of complex global economic, political and environmental challenges (Bernstein, 2015). At this time, theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu became an important figure in the definition and development of transdisciplinarity as an approach distinct from interdisciplinarity.

Nicolescu describes transdisciplinarity as going beyond the multidisciplinary juxtaposition of research findings, and also going beyond the interdisciplinary sharing of methods (Nicolescu, 2014); transdisciplinarity is defined as generative (as also argued by Barry et al., 2008 ¹ ) and ‘beyond all discipline[s]’ (Nicolescu, 2014: 187), hence the term ‘holistic’ above. Transdisciplinarity does not propose an overarching ‘mega’discipline however. Counter-intuitively perhaps, transdisciplinarity needs disciplinarity (Nicolescu, 2014): transdisciplinarity involves a critical engagement with the differences between distinctive, contrasting disciplines and research approaches, in order to rethink and reframe research problems. ² In the case of internally heterogeneous disciplines such as geography, the critical and generative approach of transdisciplinarity can be deployed with contrasting subdisciplines or specialist areas.

Importantly, while a transdisciplinary approach is based on a mix of (sub)disciplines, it does not seek a multiplication of perspectives per se, as is illustrated by its contrast with many pluralist orientations. Pluralist orientations do not always appraise the contrasts between approaches, which is how, as the following sections of this article will argue, research problems are reframed. As Deleuze (1994 (1968): 69) argues, ‘[i]t is not enough to multiply perspectives in order to establish perspectivism’. It is not the combination of several individual perspectives, but rather the comparative consideration of the situatedness of each perspective that creates understanding. Transdisciplinarity has as its basis the view that every approach produces partial findings due to the situatedness of (sub)disciplinary perspectives or methodologies, and that a critical engagement with the differences between approaches enables us to identify some of this partiality more specifically. ³ Transdisciplinary researchers then investigate how our understanding changes if we reframe our research scope to reflect (each) partiality.

Barnes and Sheppard (2010) distinguish an engaged pluralism from other forms of pluralism. Engaged pluralism can be approximately understood as the transdisciplinary engagement with difference, although Barnes and Sheppard do not link engaged pluralism with reframing research problems. The authors utilise the concept of engaged pluralism to emphasise the importance of learning about, rather than resolving, differences in research approach. Likewise, Austin et al. (2008: 562) describe transdisciplinary working as a mutual interpretation of disciplinary contrasts: ‘engaging in authentic dialogue, and recognizing our disciplinary “screens” or “lenses” are features through which the interdisciplinary process moves toward the transdisciplinary. This does not mean negating what one knows but does mean becoming free of restraining perspectives’.

The critical engagement with difference and the reframing of research that is the distinction in the basis of approach between transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is particularly illuminating not only to research design, but concomitantly also to discussions in geography that valorise diversity of practice. While for some interdisciplinary approaches complexity is simply a characteristic of the research problem that must be reduced and managed, for transdisciplinarity, complex diversity is necessary as part of the research process. The rationale outlined above demonstrates an underexplored argument for how subdisciplinary specialisation within geography is valuable: geography’s many specialisms provide the contrasts that are necessary for the reframing of research problems, that in turn can generate more holistic findings. Geographers Grove and Rickards (2022) have recently sounded a warning for the discipline regarding the technocratic, ‘smooth’ data-joining processes of ‘synthesis-as-solution’ of some interdisciplinary approaches (p. 30). Such approaches, Grove and Rickards (2022) argue, risk eroding geography’s diversity of foci and methodologies that is required for what they describe as the discipline’s richer ‘synthesis-as-understanding’ (p. 30). Technocratic approaches are governance- and solution-oriented, described by Nightingale et al. (2020: 343) as the ‘science-policy-behavioural change pathway’. These approaches seek to control messiness, and systematise data and understandings into a single shared apparatus, and thus require commensurable data that reflect similar methods of data collection and generation rather than contrasting ones. (Examples of such approaches are discussed later in this article.) The value of difference and the reframing of research is demonstrated by authors in the transdisciplinarity studies literature such as Austin et al. (2008) and especially Maniglier (2021) who draws on Deleuze, in relation to the distinction between technocratic approaches and (strong) transdisciplinary approaches. It is to these aspects of transdisciplinarity that I now turn.

The rationale of transdisciplinarity

Difference and reframing of research scope

The value of the transdisciplinary reframing of research problems has been highlighted both in the transdisciplinarity studies literature (Maniglier, 2021; Wiesmann et al., 2008) and also by both human and physical geographers Oughton and Bracken (2009), Landström et al. (2011) and Nightingale (2016), as well as by critical physical geographers Lave et al. (2018). These authors argue that research projects need careful framing in order to meaningfully address the complex problems with which we are faced. Oughton and Bracken (2009: 385–387) define transdisciplinary research (re)framing as ‘encompass[ing] the processes of identifying and bounding the area of research’, ‘an active process in which through communication and negotiation the research problem emerges and becomes defined’. A complex problem may work at multiple spatial or temporal scales, across multiple potential units of analysis, across both biophysical or social processes and imply multiple forms of possible solutions. Framing research around one of the possibilities is therefore not likely to yield robust findings: these geographers all argue for an iterative approach to framing research. While the geographers cited here base their arguments on mostly empirical experience within particular projects, I turn now to Deleuze who offers a theoretical rationale for exploiting the power of iterative framing.

For Deleuze (1994 (1968)), effective thought and research happens via the reframing of problems: it is our delimited or insufficient posing of research problems that is the basis of truly generative and novel research, although this at first glance seems paradoxical. Maniglier (2021) demonstrates how Deleuze’s apparently counter-intuitive theorisation of the problem is valuable for transdisciplinary practice. Problems in interdisciplinary research are often identified by a tangible, exterior ‘real world’ need and have a policy-oriented and technocratic focus; that is, such research responds to a self-evident problem (Maniglier, 2021). Maniglier (2021) identifies three such types of technocratic problem-identification:

the Cartesian one, for which a problem is defined by the relation between the known and the unknown; the Aristotelian (but also Kantian-Hegelian) conception, for which a problem is a contradiction or a conflict between ideas; and what one might call the cognitivist one, for which a problem is an obstacle to be overcome in the course of solving a particular task . . . problems are primarily defined with reference to what they negate [(what they are a solution for)]. (p. 28, emphasis added)

Deleuze (1994 (1968)), however, proposes that problems should be identified in a very different manner. He argues that the way we think through problems and circumstances will always be delimited in some way and it is the particular limitations we apprehend that should themselves be explored in order to redefine the problem (as proposed initially through the long argument of his early text Difference and Repetition, and then across subsequent works). This problem definition is an iterative process, reflecting transdisciplinarity’s value for reframing problems. For Deleuze, thought has an essential two-fold movement. First, we create structures/identities/categories by which to solve apprehended problems and to order life, since life is otherwise too complex (Deleuze, 2007: 285). This process Deleuze (1994 (1968)) explains with his notions of differenciation and actualisation (pp. 168–222). Second, our ongoing apprehensions of the world show us that our structures and categories do not fully explain that experience. This process is differentiation. ⁴ With every structure/identity/category we create, that is, an actualisation, we ‘arriv[e] at an always incomplete apprehension of phenomena with residual . . . unconceptualized differences’ (Robinson, 2015: 17). For the present purposes, this differentiated experience can be understood as the virtual realm (Deleuze, 1994 (1968): 168–222). These unconceptualised differences are the product of both our differentiation and actualisation – because we relate every encounter, every new thing we intuit (differentiation) to existing or previous actualisations. It is this co-production of the actual (structures/identities/categories) and virtual realms (what is possible, given those structures/identities/categories) that means we can understand more about the world by posing a new problem based on this unconceptualised difference (Deleuze, 1994 (1968): 209–210).

We can, therefore, generate new understanding, Deleuze argues, by activating differentiation (Colebrook, 2020a). Deleuze (2007) points to (sub)disciplinary difference as the source of these encounters:

To encounter through the work you do, the work that musicians, painters, or scholars are doing . . . These singular points [of encounters] are what constitute the source of creation . . . And this is true not only for the intersection of different disciplines; [but] every discipline, every section of every discipline, however small . . . each encounter produces a new position of assemblages. (p. 146)

Reflecting on his (transdisciplinary) research across philosophy and cinema, Deleuze explains that he explored cinema ‘because certain philosophical problems pushed me to seek out solutions in cinema, even if this only serves to raise more problems. All research, scholarly or creative, participates in such a relay system’ (Deleuze, 2007: 284–5, emphasis added).

It is this approach to identifying problems that takes place in thought – entwined with our experience of the world – rather than the technocratic external identification of problems that is essential to transdisciplinary research. As Maniglier (2021: 25) neatly describes, ‘[t]he fact that we could think differently is precisely what makes us think’. This argument is equivalent to the internal question that all reflective researchers tend to ask of themselves – how could I be wrong? (Sub)disciplinary difference is key, and contrasting rather than shared conceptual frameworks and methods in this context are valuable. This point is the closing argument of the final joint work of Deleuze and Guattari (1994 (1991)), his frequent collaborator, What is philosophy? and also made in the transdisciplinary studies literature (e.g. Klenk and Meehan, 2015; Nicolescu, 2014; Ross and Mitchell, 2018) as well as in geography (Grove and Rickards, 2022).

To cite more of the passage and therefore the rationale for Deleuze’s (1994 (1968)) oft-quoted phrase, ‘Something in the world forces us to think’:

count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought [i.e. our created structures/identities/categories ⁵ ] which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition. (p. 139)

Returning to the transdisciplinarity studies literature, this process is demonstrated well with the example of a transdisciplinary project in medical ethics reported by Austin et al. (2008). The project sought to develop a new framework for medical ethics, which had been dominated by what the authors describe as a detached ‘principlism’ that was having a detrimental impact on patient care. The new ‘relational ethical framework ha[d] the core elements of engagement, mutual respect, embodied knowledge, uncertainty/vulnerability, and attention to an interdependent environment’ (2008: 560) and was created as a result of transdisciplinary encounters. The research team included personnel from medicine, midwifery, nursing, psychology, physical therapy, social work, pastoral care, anthropology, law, philosophy, psychology, and theology. The project began as an interdisciplinary collaboration but became transdisciplinary, as described by Austin et al. (2008), when particular encounters between the research team led to deep reflection on the team members’ differing ways of thinking about the topic. The team all used the same research method together, focus groups, which deployed materials such as photographs of real patients they had treated, and were used to prompt discussion. A turning point came with a nurse’s description of an incident with one of the patients. Here is the description of what followed:

Her distress as she recalled this was apparent, and several research group members were obviously moved by her story. The male physician sitting next to the nurse said, ‘Could we get back on topic?’ and then promptly identified a theoretical construct for discussion. This moment nearly passed without reflection as others responded to the direction of the physician. Then someone said, ‘Wait a minute. What just happened here? It feels so familiar’. This single question directed the rest of the discussion. (Austin et al., 2008: 561)

The ensuing discussion about how different researchers had felt about the direction to ‘get back on topic’ is described as leading to one of the core aspects of the relational medical ethics developed, the idea of embodied knowledge. An existing structure or actualised, differenciated idea for understanding ethics, the physician’s ‘theoretical construct’, encountered the nurse’s and group’s experience of distress in caring for and discussing patients, a differentiation.

In the above example, the different types of understanding appropriate for exploring the research problem according to contrasting researchers – that is, embodied feeling as opposed to biological and chemical data – reflect different axiological assumptions. This case highlights how discussions about the form of data, understandings and analysis or meaning-making that are a permitted part of the research process are a crucial and distinctive element of a transdisciplinary approach: in this instance, for example, were researchers’ feelings an admissible type of understanding to be used in the development of research findings? I argue that an attention to axiology may help contrasting researchers to recognise differences in their approaches to a topic.

Attention to axiology

All research approaches have an axiological basis and imply a normative category of ‘thing’ or continua that matters. What is worth knowing implies what is worth doing something about. Heron and Reason (1997: 277) define axiology as ‘what is intrinsically valuable in human life, in particular what sort of knowledge, if any, is intrinsically valuable’ or ‘intrinsically worthwhile’ (Hills and Mullett, 2000)? Axiology is usefully considered with Barad’s (2003: 211) oft-cited comment on research and knowledge production: ‘what matters and what is excluded from mattering’ by different methods of research? An attention to axiology reveals the different scopes through which different research practices think research themes and enables the transdisciplinary reframing of research scope or questions. This section will demonstrate how overlooking axiological difference in designing research may result in findings that miss important factors or reinforce the status quo. This type of narrow research framing is potentially insidious since research design that neglects axiology may still demonstrate a high level of internal validity, and therefore appear as high quality, but will lack external validity. Axiological themes have been frequently addressed in the transdisciplinarity studies literature, and Ross and Mitchell (2018) have situated axiology as central to understanding the transdisciplinary approach.

Axiological difference is illustrated well by Solveig Joks and John Law’s (2017) investigation of salmon sustainability in northern Scandinavia, which demonstrates how the research approach has an impact on who or what will benefit from the research (building on Law’s (2004) exploration of the implications for research design on the way in which knowledge is later enacted, practised and deployed ⁶ ). In this example, government scientists were required to research salmon with local ecological knowledge holders, mostly Indigenous Sámi. The government researchers and local knowledge holders knew the salmon in two very different ways. The government scientists used a complex quantitative estimate for salmon numbers. Local knowledge holders, mostly Sámi fishermen, have an equally complex ‘mode of knowing’ salmon numbers that is mostly verbal, experiential, highly nuanced and distributed among hundreds of local fishermen according to particular fishing stretches. The two ways of knowing not only have a different onto-epistemology and methodology, but also a different axiological basis. Each is linked to different ‘things’ to ‘care for’, for example, what should be sustainable? – ‘The numbers of salmon? Their genetic diversity? The birds and animals that fish for salmon . . . The people who live by and with the [river]? Sámi practices. . .? The tourist industry?’ (Joks and Law, 2017: 151).

We need to compare the axiological assumptions of one research design as compared to others, in order to elucidate the implications of what the resulting findings will do. In Joks and Law’s salmon sustainability example, different research approaches might alternatively prioritise particular species; Sámi processes of care and the preservation of Sámi cultural identity; other cultural groups; or even the financial value from tourism of ecosystem services. All research designs yield what Haraway (1988) and Strathern (1999) term partial knowledge and are therefore intrinsically political.

Ross and Mitchell (2018) argue that to overlook axiology, as with ‘weak transdisciplinary’ or interdisciplinary approaches, is to risk perpetuating global problems. Ross and Mitchell start their discussion with the domination of the ‘Cartesian-Newtonian’, or scientific, paradigm in terms of both a) how we (in the Euro-American human-centred sense) know – humans progress through our increasing discoveries from a fixed pool of ‘knowledge’ – and b) the social order we construct – humans progress in terms of the benefit from this knowledge through increasing production. ⁷ Problematically, Ross and Mitchell (2018) highlight, the Cartesian-Newtonian research paradigm is based on rationality, that is, fact-value separation, with the value for tangible increase hidden from scrutiny. Global problems are being perpetuated, they argue, by a ‘reinforcing feedback loop’ (p. 41) between the Cartesian-Newtonian research approach, with its unexamined axiological assumptions, and the social order: because considerations of what is determined as intrinsically worthwhile have no place in such research, production and consumption are continually increased, which now result in problems such as climate change and injustice, and inequality. Most significantly for transdisciplinarity, Ross and Mitchell argue, research collaboration between different researchers who are all operating within the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, even if they represent different disciplines, will perpetuate the global challenges described.

Such discussions around axiology are valuable for debates in geography around fact-value separation. This fact-value separation has been explored prominently by Castree (e.g. 2015; 2016), who cites the work of critical physical geography proponents Landström et al. (2011) and Tadaki and Sinner (2014). Although the term axiology is not used, Landström et al. (2011) encapsulate well the link between axiology and research framing in their reflections on their flood risk mitigation project. Their initial approach of standard hydrological modelling, which assumes risk mitigation by flood defence as the solution to flooding, was challenged through work with a local community who proposed small upstream dams called ‘bunds’: they cite Wynne (2007) who reflects that such accepted models ‘nearly always [use] a frame which already implicitly imposes normative commitments–an implicit politics–as to what is salient and what is not salient, and thus what kinds of knowledge are salient and not salient’ (Landström et al., 2011: 1630). Landström et al. add to this that ‘[a]ll models simplify, but the decisions about what to leave out depend on the framing of the problem’. Tadaki and Sinner (2014) likewise investigate a New Zealand national river quality assessment and management programme, RiVAS. Along with the standard hydrological modelling for flood risk mitigation described by Landström et al. (2011), RiVAS is an example of an approach with strong internal validity but weaker external validity. RiVAS attempts to gather together a range of knowledge relating to the importance, and relationship, of rivers to people, but in ways that constrain from the outset the way in which rivers can be understood to be important. RiVAS is an example of the technocratic, systematising approaches described earlier, discussed by Grove and Rickards (2022). In RiVAS, all knowledge of river quality, covering such diverse themes as domestic water use, native fish presence, ‘natural character’ and Māori values (Tadaki and Sinner, 2014: 147), needs to be commensurable so that it can be pieced together within the same system. It is, therefore, limited to quantitative measures for a fixed set of variables. Nightingale (2016) also critiques this type of systematising approach and argues that it is the ‘probing’ of the divergence in results produced by different research approaches that itself generates understanding. A consideration of axiology adds a valuable further layer of consideration: who would gain and who would lose (Gillies and Alldred, 2012) if this rivers research was experimented with by deploying alternative ways of assessing river quality, and what circumstances have led to such winners and losers?

This section and the previous section on difference and problem reframing have together demonstrated the necessity of encounter between different knowledges in order to engage with their axiological and other contrasts, rather than using the same methods and conceptual frameworks. However, in what particular ways can such encounters work, given that a repeated challenge noted in the transdisciplinarity studies literature is that contrasting researchers find collaboration difficult (Bracken and Oughton, 2006; Stokols et al., 2003; White et al., 2009)?

Seeking and enacting encounter

A need for transdisciplinary researchers to be able to understand each other’s approach is much discussed in both the transdisciplinarity studies literature and in discussions of geography’s disciplinary diversity. However, what is the mechanism by which very different types of researchers in a collaborative project can understand or critically engage with each other’s research approaches? Here, the methodology of ethnography is helpful: ethnography has a particular process of learning that might be valuable to the critical engagement with disciplinary and research differences and to the reframing of research problems and scope. This critical engagement does not start on the condition of a complete mutual understanding; it is instead the process of trying to understand each other that is the critical engagement.

Ethnographers gain understanding through contextualising other’s worlds with their own (Strathern, 1999). They do this in the same way that we all as individuals find out about new people and practices (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995). We need to consciously and iteratively draw different metaphorical circles around the different ‘levels’, ‘scales’ and ‘contexts’ in which people and practices can be situated (Strathern’s partial connections) – in the case of transdisciplinarity, researchers and research practices. In addition, it is often difficult for specialists, for whom much of their understanding and methods are second nature, to identify what they need to explain about their work to a contrasting researcher: their knowledge may be described as tacit. Fortunately, ethnography has a method for uncovering tacit knowledge (participant) observation, which is carried out in situ within the practice of interest. In this way, an investigator does not rely on ‘insiders’ themselves to be aware of their tacit knowledge – what may be second nature can be observed directly.

Ethnography involves the ethnographer constantly exposing their etic understandings to another community’s emic frameworks, where etic relates to the ‘conceptual schemes and categories regarded as meaningful and appropriate’ by the ethnographer, while an ‘emic perspective typically represents the internal language and meanings of a defined culture’ (Olive, 2014: 130). In what ways do etic understandings not align with emic? In ethnography, these boundaries are crossed by comprehensive and repeated checking of understanding by the ethnographer. Emic and etic categories are usually different words, phrases and concepts: an example of the emic in quantitative geography, from a qualitative geography point of view, might be ‘modelling’, a term which has no clear meaning in qualitative geography, but may be initially categorised under the etic heading of statistical methods, before any detailed checking of understanding. The same term may be used for both emic and etic categories but have contrasting meanings. For example, the word ‘dynamic’ has a different meaning in different contexts within geography (Bracken and Oughton, 2006) and its meaning varies according to the temporal scale that contrasting (sub)disciplines focus on.

Maniglier (2021) also draws attention to the value of the principles of ethnography for transdisciplinarity: ‘[t]o compare [between terms and concepts] is to identify the very dynamic of divergence between the two domains’ (p. 41). The comparison that Maniglier is describing here is an exploration of others’ conceptualisations as compared to our own, as a way of understanding more about the phenomena under study. Maniglier (2021) continues with the example of kinship anthropology: ‘practi[s]ing comparative kinship anthropology is not trying to classify kinship systems within types; it is trying to relativize our own notion of kinship as it expresses itself in the grid of categories and types’ (p. 41). In other words, for each conceptualisation of a phenomenon, along what continua does the phenomenon vary, what are the extremities of the continua, and what are differenciated terms or ideas, or, if relevant, category breaks in each? These questions are not just restricted to formal models or variables, but can relate more broadly to the general language and ideas that characterise a particular conceptualisation. For example, in determining whether stones in a landscape are ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’, the stones may be conceptualised by a geomorphologist according to their orientation as part of periglacial boulder debris flows, but by an archaeologist according to how they are individually placed in relation to one another (Hamilton et al., 2008). The two conceptualisations are concerned with different variations. When we ‘pass from one to the other we understand [more of] what is at stake for each of them’ (Maniglier, 2021: 41). With mutual consideration of each conceptualisation, each researcher adjusts the scope within which they view the stones: the geomorphologist’s view shifts to the incorporation of periglacial stone formations into human-constructed stone walls, and the archaeologist’s to wider-area periglacial activity creating apparently architecturally placed stones. (The project serves as a practical example of the ambiguity of the terms ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ (Hamilton et al., 2008).) However, these new perspectives can only come into view from the position of a detailed knowledge of geomorphology or archaeology. ‘It is thus clear why transdisciplinarity cannot come at the expense of a strong [sub]disciplinary embeddedness: it is from within each [sub]discipline that this radical variation makes sense’ (Maniglier, 2021: 41, emphasis added; see also Collett, 2019).

Tsing (2010) takes a similar approach that she calls worlding. She builds her understanding of an ecosystem – for Tsing the case is the forests that are home to matsutake mushrooms – through the contrasting contextual frames of phylogeographers (who study the historical development of organisms using genetics), biologists, economic historians, local harvesters and artists. For example, Tsing compares US-based Forest Service science, which seeks to protect matsutake from over-harvesting, to Japan-based science. Japanese science posits that matsutake forests are under threat as a result of decreasing numbers of matsutake foragers: for the Japanese scientists, matsutake foragers are believed to support the forests through cutting back and raking the forest floor in order to control particular tree species and encourage others (Gan and Tsing, 2018; Tsing, 2010). Therefore, the different scientists each measure human activity in the forest, but increasing or decreasing activity has different implications to each group of scientists. Tsing remarks how she has learnt all this: it is through ‘learning to ask good questions’ (Tsing, 2010: 63).

Tsing’s approach also reflects more mundane researcher experiences and encounters. We are always encountering something new: for example, we read the same data in a different light, someone makes a remark, we explain our project in a different way to a different audience or we read contrasting research on our topic, which all result in us understanding our research problem in a slightly altered way. Tsing (Gan and Tsing, 2018) explores the value of her own ethnographic matsutake forest encounters. The smells of the forest lead her to wonder about the combinations of plants, fungi and people living here, and inspire her to take photographs. The photography leads to a further encounter, with one photograph sparking a collaboration with Gan, an artist-scholar who understands the human and non-human relations in the forest through drawing. Gan and Tsing (2018) value these ‘generative encounters’. Leavy (2011: 32) also highlights the importance of the idea of emergence for transdisciplinarity: ‘emergence speaks to the part of research practice that is unplanned, when unexpected pathways come into view, and when new insights are unearthed’. Gan and Tsing (2018) ‘call attention to ways in which incommensurable differences are sometimes able to encourage each other without homogenization’ (p. 105, emphasis added). These encounters can be understood as instances of differentiation which provoke reflection of the framing and scope of different understandings of the matsutake forest.

How can such encounters be activated in practice in different settings? It has been noted in the transdisciplinarity studies literature that it may not be enough to simply provide meeting space for discussion across (sub)disciplines and research approaches (Stokols et al., 2003). Without directed activity, particular voices, or disciplinary languages and ideas may dominate, and so true exploration of disciplinary differences may be curtailed. Boundary objects such as the region (Liu et al., 2022), field site (Dewsbury and Naylor, 2002) or particular visuals might potentially be used as more structured shared spaces of encounter. Boundary objects are described by Bowker and Star (2000) as recognisable by contrasting communities, but have a fluid enough meaning that they can be part of contrasting practices. The deployment of boundary objects here contrasts with the sharing of methods or conceptual frameworks, because researchers retain the ability to use their specialist, and therefore contrasting, expertise. There are examples of visual tools that have been successfully used for collaborative work within geography and beyond such as photos (Austin et al., 2008) and the landscape systems diagrams ( ‘state-and-transition models’) discussed by Van Dyke (2015). I propose one other visual approach, mapping, that might be productively deployed as a communal space for encounter that can also be described as a boundary object in this context. I argue that mapping enables the iterative framing of problems through considering difference and an attention to axiology.

Mapping as an example approach to transdisciplinarity

Mapping as multi-method and multi-data practice

One form of mapping, GIS, has already been described as a boundary object that accommodates contrasting approaches (Sheppard, 2022). Prominent examples include GIS that incorporates both the quantitative and qualitative, as in qualitative and feminist GIS (see Cope and Elwood, 2009), and GIS approaches that reflect both the critical and the quantitative/computational (Bergmann and Lally, 2021; O’Sullivan et al., 2017; Sheppard, 2022). The way in which a range of mapping practice – that includes other forms of map-making and map-use in addition to GIS – generates data and understandings of interest across the spectrum of geography is valuable. This section will demonstrate how mapping can provide a shared space of encounter in which contrasting researchers can deploy their own methods, thus enabling the exploration of the differences between their approaches, including the axiology underpinning their method, and the reframing of research. I will illustrate this with a worked hypothetical example, after first summarising the development of critical thinking on mapping in the last two decades that has opened up mapping as a versatile practice accommodating contrasting research orientations.

A processual orientation to mapping has become significant in critical Euro-American cartographic thinking over the last 20 years (see Caquard, 2013, 2014, 2015; Dodge et al., 2009). The qualifier of Euro-American is important here, since a performative approach to mapping has long been prominent within other knowledge systems, for example, in Hawai‘i (Louis, 2023) and Australian First Nations (Turnbull, 2000). In the context of Euro-American ideas on mapping, a process-based conceptualisation was explored by Perkins (2003), who highlighted how artists and literary scholars, among others, use and make maps in order to ask particular questions about the status quo or accepted cartographic or scientific practice. Del Casino and Hanna (2006) drew on Butler’s (1990) understandings of performativity and Kitchin and Dodge (2007) drew on a materialist approach to also counter a representational approach to cartography. Both Del Casino and Hanna (2005) and Kitchin (2010) posit a post-representational mapping practice that goes beyond privileging either representational or non-representational conceptualisations. For Kitchin and Dodge (2007), maps are deeply unstable: not only is the performance of maps different in different contexts (e.g. Crampton, 2009; Pickles, 2004), but the same individuals make something different of the same map on repeated visits – every encounter is different. Both Del Casino and Hanna and Kitchin and Dodge open up mapping as a radically flexible practice.

When mapping is conceptualised in a way that includes process as well as product, it can be used to generate a range of data types and understandings of socio-environmental phenomena, reflecting different research methodologies. In this conceptualisation, mapping does not aim for translated contrasting understandings from the field displayed in a common format on a ‘final’ map. Mapping can be a heterogeneous and emergent approach to research. For example, although the ‘data’ sought by mappers might be geospatial data calculated and illustrated on a map, it can also be the discussions or stories told during the mapping exercise, or even a more corporeal sensory understanding.

Across social science, artistic practice, NGOs, community organisations and local government, as well as within GIS, cartography, critical GIS/cartography and geography, a diversity of alternative mapping practices can be found. These mapping practices range from mapping for eliciting stories or discussion, to sketch-mapping and arts-based mapping (see Cohen and Duggan, 2021), to sensory approaches that focus on the haptic, or sound, smell, taste or sight during mapping (e.g. McLean, 2019; Rossetto, 2019), to mapping to evoke feeling and emotion (Gerlach, 2015), to serious mapping games (Pánek et al., 2018), to maps that deliberately upend common cartographic practices in order to raise questions about knowledge, identity and politics (e.g. Harmon, 2004; Krygier and Wood, n.d.; Perkins, 2009). Mapping can be thought of in terms of a continuum, whereby some practices are more focused on the final map and others are more focused on the process. The above examples show that some practices do not aim to create a final map product at all, as is the case with those that aim to elicit discussion or storytelling about local places and spaces. These subjective and open-ended approaches to mapping contrast strongly with the Cartesian perception of mapping associated with subject-object separation, and the view of space as a fixed container within which researchers discover and map knowledge. ⁸

This view of the flexibility of mapping practice and its ability to generate field data and understandings relevant to a range of geographical research methods open up mapping as a potential approach to transdisciplinarity. Different approaches to creating and engaging with maps can be deployed by different types of researchers, whereby maps and mapping processes are an overlapping and shared process that provide researchers with an opportunity to practically and critically engage with (sub)disciplinary difference. Researchers can additionally choose whether or not the data or understandings of place or space generated form part of the ‘dataset’ for a project. For example, a geographer who uses semi- or unstructured interviews and their GIScientist colleague might co-facilitate and co-analyse walkalong interviews that use the latter’s GIS-produced maps as a discussion prompt. Reciprocally, these researchers might then together create a GIS map of located (georeferenced) words, phrases or narratives from the walkalong interviews (Miles, 2023). This mixed mapping practice may be an activity separate to the main data collection or part of it. In the case of the former, an initial mixed mapping activity may enable contrasting researchers to together develop or refine the scope of the project (e.g. research questions, focus, participants) and methods. Where contrasting mapping practices are adopted as the main data collection methods, time for iteration and reframing of research scope would need to be accommodated for. In the remainder of this article, I will briefly explore how this approach to mapping can facilitate the distinctive approach to transdisciplinary research outlined earlier in this article, that is, Deleuzian difference and reframing, an attention to axiology and encounters.

Demonstrating mapping as an approach to transdisciplinarity

Returning to Deleuzian concepts, any map can be described as a particular actualisation of the virtual, echoing the fact that all research, from the outset, delimits research findings in some way. Deleuze and Guattari (1987 (1980)) see cartography as generative, as opposed to a copy or ‘tracing’ of the world (pp. 11–14). Maps open out ways of thinking about place and space, even as they appear to close down different ways of thinking. Every individual map shows us, by its difference and alterity, something in addition, in the same way that the actualised or differenciated structures/identities that Deleuze describes more generally show us ‘unconceptualised differences’ (as termed by Robinson, 2015: 17). For example, Robbins’ (2003) exploration of contrasting approaches to identifying forest in Kumbhalgarh, India, demonstrates how mapping elucidates different delimitations. An activity to compare standard GIS mapping of land cover with descriptions by local people found that different groups had different understandings of what constituted ‘forest’. For foresters, any ground with trees is forest, whereas for pastoralists forest is a more specific mix of tree species. As Robbins (2003: 249) emphasises, the divergences ‘suggest[s] something more than the simple fact that people see things differently’. The mapping raised questions around broader changes occurring in the local economy that had resulted in foresters and pastoralists competing for the same land: the pastoralists used areas for grazing that the foresters described as forest and argued should be protected from grazing.

The value of the identification of such differences through mapping for the opening out and reframing of research questions will now be demonstrated with the use of a hypothetical example. This hypothetical example project is simplified and repurposed from critical physical geographers McClintock (2015) and Lave et al. (2018). In this hypothetical example, a project is being developed to investigate the spatial pattern of US urban soil lead contamination, which in the fieldsite is disproportionately affecting African American, Asian American and Mexican American residents. The suspected cause is contamination from leaded housepaint in older buildings. The provisional research questions are ‘How are blood lead concentrations related to soil contamination and historic use of lead in housepaint?’ and ‘How are blood lead concentrations related to ethnicity?’. The team comprises a soil scientist who uses GIS for quantitative geospatial analysis and a critical urban geographer who is using qualitative biographical interviewing, as well as collecting archive material for a critical discourse analysis. The two geographers have little knowledge of each other’s specialisms and feel it will be challenging to know where to start in developing a holistic biophysical-social understanding of this health inequality.

However, during preparation of their project proposal the two researchers use a mixed mapping activity during a scoping exercise to identify some of the differences in how they each frame the research, in order to facilitate refinement of the research questions. In the first part of the activity, the soil scientist creates maps of some preliminary data on blood lead concentrations, soil contamination and social data, and the two researchers use the maps as prompts for discussion on the soil scientist’s method. Reciprocally, the soil scientist accompanies the urban geographer on scoping interviews with residents. These interviews are facilitated by the residents drawing, and adding materials such as newspaper cuttings to, a map of key life events and places across the city (see Tinkler et al., 2021). The maps serve as shared methodological elicitation tools for the two contrasting geographers. First, the maps are visual devices for the fieldsite and both researchers can recognise some of the geographic shapes (e.g. city extent and coastline) and patterns of lines (e.g. major roads) in each map, even though they are generated very differently. Second, the maps also render methodological processes more tangible (than, for example, a shared visit to the fieldsite alone), since all map-making reflects a particular way of making sense of the world (because maps must simplify and cannot reflect all modes of knowledge-making). The two geographers discuss the soil scientist’s statistical and spatial modelling of the relationship between blood lead levels, soil contamination and ethnicity, which requires georeferenced quantitative data. The two researchers also discuss the methodological choice of using life history interviews: the urban geographer is interested in residents’ self-directed history-telling of their movement around the city. The interviews suggest that successive phases of city redevelopment, planning and redlining have restricted African American, Asian American and Mexican American people to neighbourhoods neglected by city investment plans (in which, therefore, there are more older, neglected buildings).

McClintock (2015), who carried out the empirical research upon which this hypothetical example is based, has an interest and expertise across soil science, urban political ecology and historical approaches, and was therefore able to generate a nuanced, more holistic understanding of this health inequality in Oakland, California. Interestingly, part of McClintock’s exploration is carried out using a number of contrasting maps of Oakland. The investigation can be described as an instance of solo intradisciplinary working. However, it is more likely that such research is carried out by teams of geographers who do not individually have this broad range of interests.

Returning to the hypothetical example, the mapping activities provide a shared space of encounter in which explorations of the two contrasting approaches can begin, without translating one form of knowledge into another. The first part of the activity plotted quantitative data within the surface of the map, but the second part facilitated audio-recorded remembrances and discussion above the map surface. Where knowledges have the form of, as in this example, narratives around the map, a particular interpretation of Del Casino and Hanna’s (2006) concept of map space is useful. The notion of mapping space perhaps helps emphasise the shared space around the map, as well as the map surface itself, in which the performance and practice of knowledge is enacted. (Del Casino and Hanna’s map space is broader and takes in the entire spatio-temporal scope of person-map interaction.) This sharing of mapping space enables the possibility of ‘being in the same place’ that Husserl describes as intersubjectivity (Duranti, 2010: 16), and that Deleuze would describe as the encounter or event. Mapping space is a communal place where as transdisciplinarity commentator Ghosh (2020) describes, different thought styles can co-exist.

The soil scientist and urban geographer then discuss one of the analytical approaches deployed by the urban geographer, a critical discourse analysis of newspaper cuttings added to the map. In contrast to the soil scientist’s use of GIS, the critical urban geographer is not seeking to populate points on a map with text information to be taken at face value. The two different approaches have as their aim two very different types of knowledge. For each methodology, a different form of data is intrinsically valuable (using axiological terms); a chemical measure to be taken at face value in one and the language used by people to talk about their world in the other. When a geographer’s data or apprehensions of the field are based on discursive (as in this case), or potentially, creative or embodied interpretations of place and space, mapping such ‘modes of knowing’ within the two-dimensional surface of the map, as with the geospatial approach, is challenging. For the critical discourse analysis approach here, it is the language – the words used, as well as the silences – of city planners over long periods of the 20th century that deepen understanding of the processes of structural inequality that have helped shape the spatial incidence of soil lead contamination. This language is marked by an emphasis on individual prosperity and tax reductions (interrelated with city planning around growth of industry), as well as by a silence with respect to social and racial equality. ⁹ The challenges that would be encountered in attempting to map these data highlight what these types of apprehensions of place and space additionally give us that cannot be accommodated by, for example, hyperlinking text, images or audio, or sequencing formats in maps (see Roth, 2021 ¹⁰ ): what impact does the loss of particular aspects of narrative, discursive, creative or embodied understandings have on the research scope of the theme and on resulting implications of research findings? Rather than potentially obscuring these data using the above cartographic methods, the data are being brought to life in all their complexity above the map’s surface.

One particularly significant difference between contrasting approaches that has been noted within the inter/transdisciplinarity discussions within geography, as well as in McClintock’s exploration of lead concentrations, is scale (Bracken and Oughton, 2006; McClintock, 2015; White et al., 2009). A comparison of the soil science and critical urban geography approach in the lead investigation also reveals the differing scales of process that each researcher is focusing on. The soil scientist is focusing on the process by which, over a relatively small area, older housepaints flake off external building surfaces into the soil, with the lead particles then undergoing chemical processes within the soil before being ingested via locally grown vegetables. The critical urban geographer, in contrast, focuses on the relatively larger movement of capital around the city and resulting planning and building practices. Mapping is a valuable practice in opening up such axiological differences to examination: scale is of course a particularly visual component of maps. The implied solution reflected in the two contrasting methods is very different: the soil science approach implies a more local solution of, for example, soil treatments, while the critical urban geography approach implies broader changes to city planning.

It is important to emphasise, however, that although it is differences between narrative (or creative, or embodied) understandings of the field on the one hand, and quantitative data on the other that are most pronounced, there are axiological differences between contrasting quantitative methods. Although it is often advised that transdisciplinary projects must include researchers with different epistemological assumptions (Wiesmann et al., 2011), even in collaborations where (sub)disciplines collect or generate apparently similar types of data, differences in the spatial and temporal scale of the phenomena studied may prompt further consideration of the scope of research. In hydrology for example, data might relate to large river catchments and have low resolution, whereas local community knowledge might relate to particular river stretches and be much more fine-grained. For fluvial geomorphological data, the temporal scale might relate to changing rainfall and stream discharge over hours and days, but for other geomorphological data, the temporal scale might relate to millennia, and in contrast again, for social scientists, relate to generations (Bracken and Oughton, 2006; White et al., 2009).

Returning to the hypothetical example, between the soil scientist and the critical urban geographer, the story of urban lead blood concentrations is told in two very different, but co-generative, ways. Or as Deleuze would say, each understanding of lead poisoning has actualised two very different qualities (structures/categories/identities); presence of older housepaint and historic patterns of investment. The differentiation or encounter of the one approach with the other shows us some of what is missing in each and illuminates one way in which the original research question can then be reframed so that it encompasses more of the complexity of urban blood lead concentrations. The initial research questions, ‘How are blood lead concentrations related to soil contamination and historic use of lead in housepaint? How are blood lead concentrations related to ethnicity?’ are reframed to ‘How does political economy, past and present, shape the uneven socio-spatial distribution of lead and lead poisoning?’ (Lave et al., 2018: 5).

As demonstrated across these examples, the map is a shared discussion space and space of encounter. Maps have a ‘visual tenacity’ (Gerlach, 2015: 284), providing a shared visual focus. They enable a collaborative approach through ‘connecting (un)familiar places and people’ (Sutko and de Souza e Silva, 2011: 815). Critical cartographers have already noted that when different types of researchers are engaged in the same mapping exercise, discussions about different research approaches and knowledge systems are provoked (Pánek et al., 2018). Thus, maps and mapping are one approach to prompting important discussion on the contrasts in framing research, axiology and methods that may otherwise not take place.

Conclusion

The main argument of this article has been that ideas from transdisciplinarity studies and Deleuze offer a productive intradisciplinary approach to an important aspect of geographic research, research framing. Although the issue of research framing is not infrequently addressed, it is rarely explored in detail in geography. If we do not give sufficient consideration to framing and reframing the scope of multidimensional issues, we ‘will produce knowledge that is incomplete at best, and incorrect and unjust at worst’ (Lave et al., 2018: 18). The approach to intradisciplinary thinking explored is a reflexive approach to knowledge production rather than technocratic. As Grove and Rickards (2022) argue, there is somewhat of a gravitational pull towards the technocratic and technoscientific when working across (sub)disciplinary boundaries. Problematically, this approach is at odds with the type of thinking required for reframing research. As argued in this article, intradisciplinary research framing is enabled by a critical engagement with geography’s (sub)disciplinary differences: differences need to be held in view rather than translating different knowledge types into the same format.

It was also argued that an attention to the contrasting axiological bases of different (sub)disciplinary foci and approaches, the second feature of transdisciplinarity described, is valuable for engaging with (sub)disciplinary difference. These two transdisciplinary moves are enabled by the third feature explored, enacting encounter. In addition, I proposed that certain features of ethnographic practice are extremely helpful to the idea of encounter: it is not so much that transdisciplinary thinking requires shared understandings at the outset; it is within the process of interactive learning that critical engagement is enabled.

This article has additionally brought into conversation the approach of transdisciplinarity and Deleuze that rests on disciplinary difference with debates on the future of geography. While geography’s heterogeneity of foci and research approaches has been described as ‘vibrant’, ‘distinctive’ and well-positioned for understanding interrelated socio-environmental challenges, it is also argued that this heterogeneity presents risks (see Castree, 2015; Castree et al., 2022; Sheppard, 2022). The risks in such discussions include the low levels of internal collaboration and ‘working in silos’ associated with specialisation (see Castree, 2016; Sheppard, 2022; Thomas, 2022), as well as a lack of a strong disciplinary identity (Castree et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2022; Rhoads, 2022; Thomas, 2022) and resulting departmental precarity (Liu et al., 2022; Thomas, 2022). This article has presented an underexplored theoretical rationale for why intradisciplinary diversity is valuable: rather than interpreting the tension between collaboration and specialisation as a challenge to be overcome, this tension might be considered as a valuable part of the process of generating new understandings. The approach demonstrates why diversity of focus and research methodology in geography might be important to preserve, rather than, for example, aiming for the increased use of shared methods and conceptual frameworks. As such, this article illustrates another way of thinking about the benefits and challenges of the wide breadth of geography’s interests and approaches. In other words, I offer one response to Castree’s (2016: 328) request for ‘new stories about the nature and merits of “intra-disciplinarity”’.

Within this exploration, I have deployed Maniglier’s (2021) discussion of Deleuzian ideas and transdisciplinarity and demonstrated the less frequently utilised Deleuzian concept of difference (see Cockayne et al., 2017). In my article here, Deleuze is used not as a framework on which to base relational theorisations of phenomena per se, but as an orientation to the research process more broadly. As Colebrook (2020b) has recently remarked, there are many versions of Deleuze deployed. His central concern with processes of thought, and how this relates to research practice, has been little explored in geography. In this article, I have used Deleuze’s ideas on the problem, differenc/tiation, the virtual and actual and encounter. These Deleuzian ideas might be fruitfully explored further.

Finally, this article demonstrated mapping as one practical method for intradisciplinary thinking within geography, using an example project on socio-spatial health inequality in which the contrasting aims and approaches of two different researchers were explored in a mixed mapping activity . Mapping here can be thought of as a boundary object. Similar to other proposed boundary objects in geography such as the region, the fieldsite and other visual tools, mapping is more a shared space than a shared method. The processual form of mapping discussed can incorporate a wide range of research approaches and assumptions. This approach to mapping does not envisage a translation of contrasting data and understandings from the field emerging as its endpoint, but provides a shared space that promotes an iterative framing of research problems. Mapping intrinsically raises issues of axiology and research scope, and by providing a communal, focused space, creates encounters within which contrasting geographers can, in Tsing’s (2010: 63) words, ‘ask good questions’ of each other.

To conclude, I suggest that geography’s diversity of foci and approaches offers a particular underutilised potential concerning the way in which we think, as demonstrated by some of the transdisciplinary studies literature and by Deleuze, that might usefully be explored further.